The Teamsters have been voted out of representing workers at an XPO Logistics (NYSE: XPO) facility in New Jersey.
For the second time in a relatively short period, the move to push the Teamsters out of representing workers came with the assistance of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
The vote to decertify the Teamsters was confirmed in a certification notice posted Monday by the National Labor Relations Board. “It is certified that a majority of the valid ballots has not been cast for any organization and that no labor organization is the exclusive representative of the employees in the bargaining unit described below,” the statement said.
XPO announced the decertification vote March 17. However, it did not become official until the NLRB decertification.
According to the NLRB, the employees affected by the vote were full-time and regular part-time driver sales representatives, city employees and linehaul employees at the XPO facility in Cinnaminson, New Jersey. Cinnaminson is on the Delaware River and would be considered a south New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia.
The vote to decertify the Teamsters at the XPO facility comes not long after a similar vote at KWK Trucking, a small DHL-affiliated delivery service in Southern California. The Teamsters did not challenge that election, a lack of action that the Right to Work foundation viewed as a direct result of changes in federal law regarding the ability to make such challenges.
Additionally, this is the third XPO Teamsters unit in the past 15 months to have decertified representation by the Teamsters. The others were in Aurora, Illinois, and Laredo, Texas. XPO currently lists approximately 210 employees out of a 46,000-member workforce as being represented by the Teamsters.
A spokeswoman for the foundation said attorneys for the Teamsters had delayed the vote by raising the question of whether the vote needed to take place in person or could be by mail as part of COVID-19 safety protocols. But once the vote took place, the union did not challenge the results.
The vote in favor of decertification was 16-2, the foundation said. A Teamsters spokesman declined comment on the action at Cinnaminson.
Workers had petitioned the NLRB for a vote in late December. Any delay caused by the hearing over mail vs. in person ultimately proved to be brief, though the foundation said challenges before the Trump administration rules changes on challenges could often create a “multi-year delay … under the old rules.”
“Union bosses take every chance they get to maintain control over workers, even when they are overwhelmingly opposed by those they claim to represent,” Mark Mix, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation president, said in a prepared statement.
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